Tim Hecker is an electronic musician from Montreal (Canada) that belongs to the school of ambient glitch-electronica. Haunt Me Haunt Me Do It Again (Alien8, 2001), akin to Christian Fennesz' digital manipulation of guitar sounds on Hotel Parallel and +47 Degrees 56'37" - 16 Degrees 51'08, and the EP My Love Is Rotten To The Core (Alien8, 2002) manipulate samples and field recordings. Music for Tundra (a concerto for tinkling drones and random glitches) and Arctic Lover's Rock (a sonata of crackling musique concrete), off the album, do more than mimick Oval and Pan Sonic: they positively create a style and an aesthetic by layering cliches into organic, romantic creatures. The Work Of Art In The Age Of Cultural Overproduction pushes the envelop, crafting rumbles, rattles and grates that defy the imagination but manage to sculpt a magniloquent atmosphere. On the other hand October and Ghost Writing are calm ambient watercolors, a genre in which Hecker gives a miniature masterpiece with the delicate timeless Boreal Kiss. A ghostly landscape is evoked by the strident distorted melody of City In Flames, the fluctuating funereal drones of Borderlines and the rustling background of Night Flight To Your Heart. Each piece comes with one or two appendixes that clarify/confuse its meaning, the difference between clarification and confusion being purely subjective.

Presents Radio Amor (Mille Plateaux, 2003 - Alien 8, 2007) digs deeper into the natural texture of the sounds that the composer is artificially producing. Song of the Highwire Shrimper basically applied the austere aesthetic of the piano sonata to Hecker's stream of digitally processed tones, achieving both more depth and more movement. Spectral is a subtle meditation on self-hypnosis that sounds like a blurred and warped version of Terry Riley's Rainbow in Curved Air. Azure Azure bridges two worlds by revealing that the alter ego of its swirling nebula of musique concrete is a a wild Jimi Hendrix-ian solo of glissandoes; and then making the two-headed creature drown into a black hole.
Hecker explores a number of narrative manners in this album. Jimmy shows how the simple loop technique can be used to create a piece with enough dynamics to qualify as a "song". I'm Transmitting Tonight highlights the power of variation in a stable framework. 7000 Miles juxtaposes a highly visible foreground and a busy background that is not immediately perceived, each carrying powerful psychological implications. Careless Whispers tells a story by transforming itself from a pulsating darkness into a hissing luminescence. The closer, Trade Winds White Heat, makes a point of dissolving a simple sonata into static radio interference.

Mirages (Alienate, 2004) and Mort Aux Vaches (Staalplaat, 2004) worked the same magic on a smaller scale.

Harmony in Ultraviolet (Kranky, 2006) marked a further refinement of Hecker's studio prowess but somehow failed to attain the same degree of elegance and sophistication of the early works. It occasionally does create poignant atmospheres: the dense floating mass of Stags Aircraft Kings and Secretaries, the fibrillating metallic spiderweb of Dungeoneering, the distorted glissando-like transmission of Radio Spiricom, the violent melodic warping of Whitecaps of White Noise I, that sounds like the remix of a baroque piece done by a serial killer (Chimeras also evokes a baroque feeling), and the four watery parts of Harmony in Blue. But they mostly remain isolated icebergs of unemotional matter, regardless of how interesting the sonic qualities may be. The shorter pieces, then, sound perfectly redundant. Hecker fails to tell a story. His music sounds like the equivalent of a craftsman who lays his polished tools on the table. Hecker neglects to take the next step: building something with those tools.

The 10" mini-album Atlas One (Audraglint, 2007) offered one of his best "concrete" symphonies.

His most "gentle" and contemplative work yet, An Imaginary Country (Kranky, 2009) felt like a collection of sketches for romantic sonatas. His brand of "romanticism" remained a fairly abrasive one, but the noisescapes for guitar, synthesizer and laptop had been replaced by more humane constructs with mellotron and strings, and by a general trend towards engagement instead of collision. This also means that Hecker relies a lot more on droning and repetition, which inevitably sounds either monotonous or meandering, and only occasionally (Sea Of Pulses) achieves emotional pathos. The lugubrious crescendo of Where Shadows Make Shadows is a case in point: it doesn't do much more than repeat itself for eight minutes with slight variations.

The single Apondalfia (Part 1 + 2) (Room 40, 2010) was more invigorating than anything on the previous album.

Even at his most trivial, very few electronic soundscapes can sound so
alive as Hecker's. The lugubrious and massive collage of Ravedeath, 1972 (Kranky, 2011),
recorded in a church in Iceland, is emotional and melodramatic despite being wordless. There is a strong narrative feeling that pervades the ebbing and flowing of his sonic UFOs, like a silent movie with unfamiliar characters. The music is mostly built around the church's pipe organ and arranged with synthesizer, piano and electronic noise, basically a set of "interferences" by alien instrumentation with the sacred sound of the organ.
The three-movement suite In the Fog performs mesmerizing metamorphoses:
a glacial organ drone calls together a crowd of unrelated sounds inducing
a gentle cacophony like of an orchestra that is tuning their instruments;
an accelerated minimalist repetitive pattern collides against a rising
smokestack-like hiss but eventually triumphs;
another glacial drone splits into harsher drones and another repetitive
ticking, reaching a peak of noise and pathos before a melancholy death.
Like many of these composers, Hecker is weak in staging the endings: each
piece evolves in an intriguing manner but doesn't quite know how to end.
Hence, the dyptich: Hatred of Music unleashes a
dense, revolving, symphonic cluster (a tragic zenith of the album)
but its second part is simply a slow and pointless fadeout.
The three movements of In the Air are progressively more tense:
the embryonic chaos of the first one leads to the noisy conflagration of
the second that decays into the feeble piano sonata of the third.
The contrast between the violent wall of sound and the emerging
piano sonata (only hinted at, never completed) is particularly effective.
These are compositions of austere chamber electronica.
Meanwhile, the subdued and barely articulate
No Drums,
Analog Paralysis 1978
and
Studio Suicide 1980
recall the most psycho-ambient Brian Eno of the 1980s.
The Piano DropIn the Fog IIn the Fog IIIn the Fog IIINo DrumsHatred of Music IHatred of Music IIAnalog Paralysis, 1978Studio Suicide, 1980In the Air IIn the Air IIIn the Air III

Virgins (Kranky, 2013), a vastly inferior work, is instead a hodgepodge
of trivial and poorly executed ideas.
Ostensibly assembled from live performances on acoustic instruments, the pieces
simply reenact facile stereotypes of the minimalist avantgarde
(a pulsing clockwork of pianos in Virginal, a
jungle of incestuous drones in Radiance,
ripples of echoes in Stigmata II, etc)
and sometimes employ a
massive sound to disguise the lack of ideas (as in Live Room).
Hecker is a master at turning the slightest sound into a gloomy sign,
but even his skills cannot lift these half-baked pieces out of emotional
mediocrity.

The sound sculptures of Love Streams (4AD, 2016) follow a novel
strategy. Opener
Obsidian Counterpoint doesn't give it away, but it already sounds like
a medieval melody played on a flute
marching towards an abyss of musique concrete.
Music of the Air fully reveals the concept:
fragments of singing drift in and out of a carpet of dissonant electronics and droning electronics.
Hecker's machines intone melodies of medieval liturgical hymns
(mostly composed by Johann Johannsson)
and, being machines, they turn such melodies into mathematical formulas.
The concept picks up steam with the
fluttering Violet Monumental I and the
mechanical Violet Monumental II, two "presto" movements that build
up momentum.
Castrati Stack leaves the voices intact as much as possible, and turns
out to be a highlight.
Collapse Sonata seems to belong to a different album: a remix of spaghetti western soundtracks.
The darker, ominous Black Phase sounds like the overture of a doom-metal
suite (that never happens).
As usual, Hecker's music is painstakingly assembled.
As usual, it doesn't get anywhere: there is no narrative, emotional, conceptual
development. You have to content yourself with admiring the technique.